Author: Ross Spencer

Digital preservation domain expert and full-stack software developer. A researcher, analyst, and programmer. I am currently a senior software architect for Iona Systems Ltd. focused on the Web3 Orcfax (Cardano) Oracle, and Arkly (Arweave) projects. I am a freelance digital preservation developer and advisor. I worked previously on the Archivematica and PRONOM, and as a digital preservation specialist at Archives New Zealand, and The National Archives, UK. I have 14 years of experience working across the sector and have a keen interest in information and records management.

Silver birth tree in Ravensburg featuring its characteristic eye-like bark.

Code as memory?

It is very poetic to think about code as it containing the memory of its maintainers. I don’t entirely disagree with the idea, but it’s overly poetic and the reality of maintenance on systems that have become too unwieldy is anything but poetic.

C3PO narrates the story of Star Wars to the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi

PRONOM’s dustiest records

Tyler’s recent blog post for the PRONOM Hack-a-thon Week 2024 (my previous for this week), brought up an interesting point about two of PRONOM’s oldest outline records, Real Video Clip (fmt/204) and Real Video (x-fmt/277). How did they end up in PRONOM?

NB. because of the complexity of this post, it may be easier to read in original blog form, than on Mastodon here: https://exponentialdecay.co.uk/blog/pronoms-dustiest-records/

Tyler suggests:

I assume PRONOM originally added these based on MIME types available.

I thought I knew the answer, but it prompted a forensic look at the records to see if what I thought I knew aligned with reality!

What I will miss about Twitter

People seem to be moving. You’ll find me on Mastodon and BlueSky.

As I happened to be looking through some 2015 archives today, I made notes of the things I will miss.

twitter walls twitter sentiment analysis twitter graphs twitter bots twitter history and its use for activism twitter history and its use for emergent trends twitter knowledge base and advance search twitter serendipity

The history books will be pretty unbelievable when they come to write about it. It may never come back, but it did exist. And it was fun, not until it lasted, because it lasted too long, but until it was no fun no more.